Interview with Pilvi Porkola
Mad House Helsinki: the upcoming performance is a continuation of the 2016-17 work Kirjastoesseet#1 ”Norsut piirretään usein luonnollista kokoaan pienempinä”. What is the relationship between the previous work and the upcoming performance?
Pilvi Porkola: On stage I will performe Kirjastoesseet #2 ” Portaikkoja ajatellaan kovin harvoin” and in Mad House's online publication will be the text Kirjastoesseet #3 ”Käytännön harjoituksia”. They both continue my Kirjastoesseet (Library Essays) series.
What all the parts of the series have in common is that they deal with books, reading and death. I have noticed that there is a kind of serialism in my own work these days, with themes, forms or details from previous performances or writings continuing to live on in subsequent performances.
The first part of the series Kirjastoesseet#1 ”Norsut piirretään usein luonnollista kokoaan pienempinä” took place in an empty library in Maunula, and was a listenable essay and installation. The second part of the series, now coming to Mad House, is a solo performance. The third part of the series is a text. They all have the same root, but the ways of reading them differ.
Photo by Eva-Liisa Orupõld
MH: Your performance Kirjastoesseet#2 ”Portaikkoja ajatellaan kovin harvoin”, is a poetic essay on death and what we are left with. It also deals with the death of your father. What emotions or experiences have you encountered in creating the play?
PP: It has been several years since the death of the father, so although the performance is based on the experience of the father's death, the reflection on death expands into a more general reflection, and perhaps a reflection on one's own mortality. It has been challenging to make this performance, not so much because of the grief, but perhaps more because I have been thinking about this performance for so long. You would think that if you had been planning the show for a long time, you would have a lot of material and it would have matured over time, but paradoxically the opposite has happened: none of my earlier ideas and thoughts seem to work any more, but have become obsolete in my own mind. The stage seems to be "empty" all the time and I sometimes feel a strange reluctance to bring anything into it.
Death is, of course, a heavy subject. Someone has said that you have to be careful which subject you choose, because you carry that subject and perspective with you, you live with it and it starts to affect everything else. I think that's true, and it's not easy to carry the theme of death with you. However, I think that even if the subject is heavy, the performance doesn't have to be.
MH: How do you see your artistic work and research interacting with this piece?
PP: The first part of the series took place in a library and was related to my research in the "How to do things with performance?" project (2016-2021), where I focused on the relationship between performance and institutions. I was interested in the everyday performativity of institutions and how our daily activities sustain institutions. At the same time, it was an autobiographical performance and these latter parts, each in their own way, continue to reflect on autobiography. From a research point of view, I think that both of these are examples of how the autobiographical theme can be worked through in different ways through a certain kind of fragmentation. The exploration may not be conveyed to the viewer, and I don't think it needs to be, you can just watch the performance as a performance.
